Season 3, Episode 4, “Nerd for a Day”

Pre-Credits Gag:  Michelle pretends that her toy car is broken and then Joey pretends to fix it.  At the end he makes her say thanks by giving him a kiss, which leads me an observation I somehow haven’t made yet:  man, they sure do kiss that baby a lot.  I mean, I know that parents kiss their babies and everything, but it seems like kind of a weird thing for actors to have to simulate all the time.  It’s also not like it’s an accident, either-the shows creators must really want to see those dads kiss that baby all the time, right on the mouth.  What’s weirdest about it is if you think about how hard it is to get a baby to act out a scene successfully and realize that those guys were probably sitting on that set kissing that baby all fucking day, under hot lights, on a regular basis.

Jesse and Joey rehearse their latest ad jingle with a cheesy doo-wop group (where do they get this endless stream of corny looking musicians?  I swear it’s never the same people…).  The baby is incorporated into their routine in a way that’s clearly done by editing in shots of her that were taken at a different time.  As if that didn’t make the scene feel inorganic enough, the doo-wop group is abruptly shuffled off-screen the moment their routine ends.  Who goes over to someone’s house for rehearsal and then immediately walks out in silence the second it’s over?

Anyway, it’s a good thing those guys left right when they did because the moment they’re gone, DJ barges into the room and starts talking about her day at school.  She was assigned a report where she has to observe a family member for a day and decided to pick Michelle.  Stephanie enters the scene shortly afterwards and confesses that she got held after school because she and a bunch of other kids in her class were calling this one kid, “Duckface.”  Jesse tries to tell her that it’s fucked up to make fun of other kids at school but Joey keeps interjecting with lame ass jokes until Jesse actually makes him leave.  Right on!  Anyway, Jesse tells Stephanie about how he had an awkward phase when he was younger and kids made fun of him.  That’s right, y’all, Jesse understands the pain of being teased because he experienced it himself, and we all know that’s the only way to learn a lesson in the empathy-free world of Full House.  Jesse then tells Stephanie that she has to call Duckface on the phone to apologize, which is a little extreme if you ask me.  Maybe it’s not such a big deal nowadays, what with these kids and their cellular computer phones and the google and the IM and whatnot, but back in the neon-mismatched haze of the late 80’s/early 90’s, being in the 4th grade and calling someone of the opposite gender on the phone was always kind of a big ass deal.  Anywho, alls I’m sayin is how come she couldn’t just apologize to him at school the next day?

Danny comes home and tells Joey that Rebecca Donaldson will be out of town tomorrow so he needs to find a last-minute co-host for Wake Up, San Francisco tomorrow.  Joey immediately starts kissing his ass and rubbing his shoulders until Danny reveals that he’s already booked him for the gig.

Stephanie is forced to call Duckface on a phone that I would like to point out is shaped like lips.  She tries to make the call as quickly as possible and repeatedly attempts to hang up but is foiled each time by Uncle Jesse.  It’s weird how Duckface is supposed to be just sitting there on the other line while there are these long silences and urging from her Uncle going on in the background.  It’s like that whenever the Uncles get a call from their boss, too, where they’re always quibbling and grabbing the phone from each other.  I guess that if you’re on the phone with someone at the full house you just have to listen patiently because there’s always so much wacky shit going on over there that you can never get a decent conversation going.

In the morning Danny tells Joey that he’s holding them up and they’re gonna be late to host Wake Up, San Francisco and you really can’t tell if the scene is about Danny being anal retentive or Joey being a big fuck-up idiot.  Anyway it doesn’t even matter because the doorbell rings and, sure enough, it’s that muthafucka Duckface.

Duckface tells Stephanie that since she called him on the phone they are now boyfriend and girlfriend and he’s gonna sexually harass her for the rest of eternity.  Of course that’s what happened!  That’s why you must treat nerds like shit at all times!!!  If you relent for one second they will latch onto you forever and ruin your life!  Anyway, Stephanie doesn’t manage to tell Duckface that she doesn’t wanna be his girlfriend because he’s a gross weirdo but she is able to spin it so that they can be boyfriend and girlfriend just as long as he never looks at her or talks to her and they keep it a secret from everybody.  I guess Duckface must have pretty low self-esteem because he totally goes for it.

DJ bangs her knee while chasing down Michelle, who’s stolen her report.  Michelle and DJ then have a tender moment where Michelle kisses DJ’s hurt knee.  It made my heart hella fuckin warm to watch that shit.  Stephanie then barges into the room looking for Uncle Jesse but when DJ says he’s probably in his room it really makes you wonder why Stephanie stopped to ask DJ rather than just go straight to Jesse’s room.  I guess it must have been a lame attempt to try to bridge this scene to the next one.

Stephanie barges into Jesse’s room, which really fails to have a dramatic effect because that’s always how she comes into his room.  She explains to Jesse how forcing her to call Duckface has ruined her life and tells him to go fuck himself.

Danny has to open Wake Up, San Francisco by himself because Joey is offstage getting a donut.  Man, Joey’s really going for that gold medal in the Worthless Asshole Olympics.  He’s late to a tv show hosting gig that his friend hooked him up with even though that same friend gave him a ride to it.  So Joey starts plugging his upcoming stand-up gig and then he and Danny bring out their first guest, a sweaty weirdo who wrote a book about hug therapy.  The guest starts counseling them and Joey and Danny immediately begin criticizing each other and then they argue.  Can we just once see Wake Up, San Francisco be anything other than a terrible disaster?

DJ comes home from school with the news that she got a really good grade on her report about Michelle and shares that her experience of observing has led to a deeper understanding of Michelle.  Hey, great.  Stephanie comes home and tells Uncle Jesse that Duckface is still all up on her jammy but Jesse maintains that apologizing to him was the right thing to do.  Their conversation is interrupted by a ring at the doorbell, which Stephanie assumes is her friends coming over to work on a project but ends up being Duckface.  Duckface tries to cop a feel real quick while they’re alone but then Stephanie’s friends show up and see them together and start talking hella shit.  Incidentally, one of the kids is Harry, who we haven’t seen yet this season.  Harry’s pretty rad if you ask me.  Anyway, Stephanie is upset by her friends taunts, but having now experienced being teased herself she understands how it feels and so refuses her friends insistence that she treat Duckface like shit while they all watch in a sick, twisted Middle-School ritual.

Stephanie then proclaims that she and Duckface are friends and she doesn’t care who knows it, which seems like kind of a stretch if you ask me.  I mean, it’s cool that she’s not down to treat him like shit all the time, but when you consider that when she previously showed him the least bit of kindness his response was to latch on to her and make a bunch of sexual advances, it doesn’t really make sense to want to be his friend.  Anyway, Stephanie then recalls a time for each of her friends when they, too, were teased, thus enabling them to understand the pain it causes.  It’s a good thing she had a specific example for each of them or her whole argument would have totally failed.  So in the end Duckface is invited to join their little group of friends even though he’s a total creep, and thus began a long career in Duckface’s life of using pity to get girls to go out with him.

After fixing everything with her wise and inspiring words, Stephanie goes up to Jesse’s room to tell him what happened even though he was actually evesdropping the whole time.  She then tells him that she learned a lesson about how fucked up it is to tease people and that she’s concerned that she and Uncle Jesse are no longer friends because she was such an asshole.  Gentle music plays as Uncle Jesse tells her that he’ll always be there for her and then there are hugs.  It’s kind of weird that they reserved the music for this tacked-on ending rather than Stephanie’s inspiring speech about teasing.  I wonder if there were established rules about when the music should be used?  Another thing that’s weird is that there was no follow-up whatsoever to Joey’s shitty ass performance on Wake Up, San Francisco.  You’d think that there would have been some sort of aftermath for that, right?